Taking Time to Reflect...

I thought I'd take some time to express some of my core beliefs. I believe these statements to be true, statements of fact, axioms if you will:

1) Being a Republican makes you a bad person.

2) Jamelle Hollieway is the greatest college quarterback of all time and in all dimensions.

3) No, you're color blind.

4) Being a Democrat makes you a sucker.

5) All australian shepherds should be named Sydney, Sheila or Muriel.

That is all.

Pat Buchanan

is an asshole. Pat Buchanan is a bad person because he thinks what's works for him must work for everyone else, therefore anyone not as successful as him is not trying. This lack of comprehension of micro-realities of the human condidition is pandemic in the republican mind.

This lack of empathy combined with the empirical data that minorities in America are impoverished at a rate much higher than thier WASP nieghbors has led the Pat Buchanans of the world to believe that minorites are either incapable success or have decided en masse as a population to engage in a parasitic cultural experiment wherein the Pat Buchanans support them.

This is where racism in modern day America has its roots. This lack of empathy for the varied individual relationships to their environment and a world view crafted via logical falacies such as post hoc ergo proctor hoc are the origins of the epidemic of republican doushe baggery in our society.

Pat is a racist, a classist, an anti-semite and a facist.

But, despite what a recent article claims, he is not an anti-semite because he is anti-Israel. He is anti-Israel because he is afacist and an anti-semite. The mere existance of the political entity of Isreal is one of the top five most destructive forces on the planet. It is demonstrably apartheid. It is empirically an illigetemate government. It is a profoundly illogical recipient of American foriegn aide. The policies that Israel has promoted in the last 50 years are prima facia the source of most Islamic terroism today. The settlements in Palestine are monstrous acts against human dignity and international law, Isreal being sanctioned by the UN by an order of magnitude more than Iraq ever was.

Criticism of Isreal is fair and just. Defimation of the Jewish people because of their Jewishness is why Pat Buchanon is anti-semitic.

Get it straight, minion.

It's not always about you, Minion...

I'm writing this because if I write it I'll remember it and I know I'll need to recall this at some point.

Some numbers all in 2007 dollars:

____________________1968____2007____Increase
Median Household income..$39000.......$50000......20%
Average tuition and fees......$4000.........$8000........200%
Average home price..............$115,000....$195,000...60%

So we see that through this very narrow lens income has not increased at a rate even close to the increase in the costs of middle class living. I have not included a couple facts which illustrate the point even further.

First, that it's difficult to quantify the increase in health care costs over this period because before 1968 it was illegal in most states for hospitals to be anything but non-profit organizations. Second, the median income number is a bit skewed because of a massive consolidation of wealth at the top of the income scale over this period. If you remove the top 5% of income earners from this calculation the median income adjusted for inflation has actually gone down.

The point being everybody you know who went to school in the 60's and thinks people should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps has confirmed my guiding principle of the contemporary republican party: Republicanism is not a political ideology it is the never ending search for the justification to be a dick.

Joe Scarborough Officially Announces Candidacy...

...for Lord Douche Earl of Scumbag Duke of Ignorance, Esq.

This mornings exchange between Joe Scarborough, some insignificant character and Rudy Giuliani settles it. Joe Scarborough now officially believes the following:

1) Because Jesse Venturi noted that we have only tortured Muslims Jesse is suggesting that our policy is to torture Muslims.

2) That torture is eminently effective, and that there is no body of evidence, existing, growing or established that suggests torture is ineffective.

Just debunking the simple "because you disagree with me, you hate America" technique that seems to be embedded in Republican psyche seems an excercise in futility; its been done repeatedly in this venue and both the factual inaccuracy and the intent of the technique are well known to you, Minion.

Instead, my exercise has become to evaluate carefully the statement and determine potential truths.

Obviously torture worked if the point of toruture was to establish a rationalle for invading Iraq.

I'm done with this post....moving on.

Liz Cheney: A Primer in Invalid Argumentation

[ Minion, I'll spell check after I get to work, so don't bother pointing out my errors and typos.]

Oh, Morning Joe, if all the world be a stage then those who play at vacuous spew use Moring Joe as their green room. Liz Cheney this morning is continuing her media tour promoting the patriotic heroism of her father. Here's a stripped down summary of her talking points:

So it's just a difference of oppinion. I mean, intellegent men can disagree, and this is just one of those times. Sure torture is illegal, but that's the thing, see water boarding is not torture.

So that's part one of Liz's by proxy defence of her super villain father, that the act we are debating simply does not qualify as torture and therefore as not illegal.

Part two, the OLC wrote legal opinions telling us that these techniques that the intellegence community desperately wanted to use were perfectly legal.

Also, it worked. These "techniques" (which is a word Obama has chosen to use to describe these acts) produced "actionable intellegence".

That's part three, that by doing these things attacks on America were stopped.

Further, what would you do if you thought an attack on your wife and children was eminant? Wouldnt you use every technique at your disposal to stop that from happening?

That's part four that after 9 Eleven, we thought another attack was iminant and that we made the decision to use every technique at our disposal to keep another attack from happening.

Let's just go through this real quick. This is a pretty easy debunk:

Part 1: Waterboarding, the subject "technique" was illegal when the United States prosecuted Japanese soldiers in WWII, and US soldiers during Viet Nam. So there is a precedential chain that establishes the illegality of waterboarding. Further there are no, not one, case of the aquital of someone chaged with waterboarding who has been found not guilty of torture. To be precise, not everyone accused and found guilty of a crime is guilty of a crime, but everyone found guilty of waterboarding is not guilty of waterboarding they are guilty of torture and a war crime. It was torture during the spanish inquisition, it was torture during WWII, during the reign of Pinochet, and during the race wars in the Balkins. It is decided law.

Part 2: The memos were recinded. They were recinded by subsequent Bush administration OLC lawyers and not because a policy had shifted but because they were irresponsible and a poor excuse for legal opining. Further, that as Eugene Robinson argued, if the standard for legality is a memo from a lawyer, and that that opinion is only invalid if it can be proved the opinion was a departure from the lawyers genuine understanding of the law, then I am 1) proposing that I may rob banks with impunity, and that I have this right because of a very important but subtle component of Texas community property rights, that I won't go into now and 2) I'm going to law school 3) I'm going to start writing memos.

Part 3: The more information we get our hands on, the more memos that are released, the more we believe this to be false. It is becoming clear that we got all the information we needed from FBI interogators before the CIA started with torture. We also know that torture victims will say anything to make the torture stop. If this is not the case I'm suggesting we extradite Senator John McCain to Viet Nam to stand trial for the war crims he claimed to committ while a prisoner there in the sixties and seventies.

Part 4: This is the ultimate Republican judo look at the shiny thing technique. Judo because it takes their own cowardice in the face of crisis and attempts to apply it to the democrats who they believe are to cowardly to break the law or to "do what it takes". It's the shiny thing in the same way that the nuclear smoking gun meme was so powerful. Really though, how do you know another attack is eminant? What are the grounds by which we come to this conclussion? And what is eminant? Is eminant by 9/21? Is eminant by 9/11/02? How long can a terrorist be in custody and still be in possesion of intellegence on eminant attacks? A week? A month?

One last point, the right thing to do would be to find every single individual who had a hand in facilitating torture and prosocute them. We can prosecute Nancy Pelosi AND Dick Cheney now, in American courts, have the investigations and the trials right now under our control, or they can happen 10 years from now in Germany, or Spain or Holland. There will be accountability on the democratic and republican sides, and the choice we have is weather we want to control that acountability or leave it to someone else.

IMPORTANT UPDATE

I was going to blog about the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning, the apparent preference for these operating models on each side of the political spectrum and the ramifications of these tendencies on cultural norms and social institutions, but I have decided to write a sonnet dedicated to my wife's mucus:

Minion, behold the nadir of the lyric:

Dreams and pathways I have known

The times of man eons peak and eras trough

Cacophonous yalp as virally sewn

Still lyrical I hear my dear love's cough

Harmonious day flees panoptical night

And a green phlegm rubicon traverse

Viscus, cascading snot affright

Fly, silent fever embrace the inevitable adverse

Forgotten roads through rooky woods meander

Cursed cough, thy name is emerald molasses

Among fallen timbers and brush forever wander

Pray, find your place amid begotten corpses

And time, immortal guardian of aged, ailing genus locus

A dimming light, we say goodnight to all my Love's disgusting mucus

Note to Shark, re: Jumping

Oh, dear sweet baby jebus. Morning Joe has done it. That's it. They've laid out in very clear terms the structural diagram, or playbook if you will, for the architecture of douschbaggery.

1) Apparently we were one country on September 11 and a different country on September 12.
2) Apparently we all gave up our entire philosophy of governance on September 12 in order to shift our allegiance to the federal government. This includes "libertarians" and "small government conservatives" like Joe.
3) Apparently anyone who thinks we should prosecute our "leaders" for past acts of "laywers for issuing legal opinions" is a pure ideologue.
4) Apparently the fact that SERE school exists is proof that there is a precedent for "enhanced interigation techniques" in the world and therefore there must be a "gray area" concerning the legality of the acts.

Did I say douschbaggery? What I meant was cowardice. The limbic brain manifest. American exceptionalism writ large, amoral familialism just came into the MSNBC studio at Rockafeller plaza looked straight into the camera and took a dump in Mika Brzynski's shoe, the allegator Bruno Magli's with extra high heel.

MSNBC, what the hell are you doing with these idiots?